AUGUST 2006 ı goodreading 9 author profile he started to write, he wrote the books he wanted to read when he came to Australia. ‘Those are now out of the way and I feel I can write anywhere I like,’ he says. ‘I have been a storyteller since I was five years old’, he laughs. ‘That’s how I survived as a little English-speaking boy in an Afrikaans environment. My storytelling became the best weapon I had.’ He discovered at a young age that he could deflect the taunting of bullies with a good story, much like Peekay, the hero of The Power of One. In April Fool’s Day he relates how he spent many hours telling Damon stories about Africa, to help his son forget about his chronic pain. He has some difficulty with the ‘writer’ label. ‘I don’t really think of myself as “a writer”. It’s such a precious expression these days. I just think of myself as someone who tells stories which happen to be in the written word.’ He thinks that a lot of writers nowadays ignore the importance of storytelling and focus too much on form and function and beautiful words. ‘Of course, writers write best about the cultures they know,’ he says. ‘I am a character-driven writer rather than a plot-driven writer, and that restricts me.You need to know a character intimately before you can write him. Plot-driven writers have one central plot. The characters are built around the plot and are often thinly drawn, whereas in my work the characters are intensely drawn.’ Whitethorn sees him back in South Africa at an orphanage, revisiting childhood experiences which will always be with him. He says of Whitethorn: ‘This is a retur n to Africa for me, a revisiting of a past that wasn’t always easy, but which never- theless gave my childhood a richness and understanding that served me well later in life … Whitethorn is back to that fierce and dark landscape where kindness and cruelty, love and hate share the same back yard.’ He regards Whitethorn as ‘a perfect metaphor for Africa’. ‘The whitethorn is the last food available to animals during the drought, and the first food available when the rains come,’ he explains. It is this focus on detail, the ability to share the essence of a place, that makes his work so authentically readable. ‘The reader must be able to see what you are saying,’ he says of his vividly drawn African landscapes. ‘There is a conventional wisdom that you can always write best about a place when you’re away from it. My memories of childhood in South Africa are very fresh, and standing outside looking in I can write very clearly about them.’ He is not convinced that he would have become a writer had he stayed in South Africa. The reality was too stark: he was a clever child who received a scholarship to a private boarding school, but he was still the poor kid who was deeply affected by his circumstances. He felt alienated, both in the orphanage and at boarding school, always having a sense of not belonging. ‘When I came to Australia, I could see the whole thing in perspective and write about it,’ he says. His new perspective allowed him to look at his old culture and his new culture quite clearly and objectively. ‘I must confess – I had to study the Australian culture very deeply! I was fortunate because I started as a copywriter in advertising, so I was intensely observing things and trying to persuade people to do things. The language of the advertising culture was deeply absorbed in me over thirty-five years, almost by osmosis.’ But it was also a technical thing. He admits that his earlier work, such as The Potato Factory, was written more from the head than the heart. By the time he wrote Jessica and Four Fires, he could write from the heart. ‘Potato Factory is probably the best written book,’ he says, ‘[in] the sense of language and ver nacular, but it is also historical and I used larger-than-life characters.’ He points out that it is easier to write from a historical rather than contemporary viewpoint. ‘I was steeped in Dickens from an early age,’ he recalls. ‘It wasn’t hard to transfer that knowledge of early Victorian and Georgian England into Australia.’ To Courtenay, writing isn’t all about inspiration. ‘It has been said that creative writing more closely configures with mathematics than it does with art,’ he says, and he isn’t joking. He once received a long letter from two Oxford University dons, one a professor of mathematics and the other a professor of English, whose hobby was deconstructing novels into mathematical symbols. This apparently enabled them to ascertain whether He has some difficulty with the ‘writer’ label. ‘I don’t really think of myself as “a writer”. I just think of myself as someone who tells stories which happen to be in the written word.’